Petra Schwille studied physics in Stuttgart and Göttingen and obtained her PhD in 1996 with Nobel Laureate Manfred Eigen at the MPI for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany. After a postdoctoral stay at Cornell University (Ithaca, USA) she established a research group at the MPI Göttingen in 1999 and accepted a call as professor and chair of biophysics at the BIOTEC of the TU Dresden in 2002.
In 2011, she was appointed as scientific member of the Max Planck Society and director at the MPI of Biochemistry, Martinsried. Her research interests range from single-molecule biophysics to bottom-up synthetic biology of artificial cells.
